The Dodgers’ Yasiel Puig celebrates after reaching third base during the fourth inning of Game 2 of the NLDS on Saturday night at Dodger Stadium. The Dodgers weren’t shut down by Diamondbacks starter Robbie Ray as they often were during the regular season. (Photo by John McCoy, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

LOS ANGELES — Robbie Ray had hooked the Dodgers to his joystick and pulled them wherever he wanted.

Then the Arizona Diamondbacks asked Ray to try something different when the National League Division Series came around. They changed the settings a bit.

And he lost. That was different.

There was a bus outside Dodger Stadium awaiting the Diamondbacks, but Ray had placed no one under it. He said the fact he was starting with two days off after he had thrown 34 high-energy pitches Wednesday night had nothing to do with his most erratic start of the season against Los Angeles.

But Manager Torey Lovullo, who has been rolling sevens for months now, removed a major variable out of an equation that had worked time and again.

The Dodgers won Game 2, 8-5, and take a 2-0 lead to the Sonoran desert. Their next win will take them into the National League Championship Series for a second consecutive year.

“I felt great,” Ray said. “It wasn’t exactly like they were roping the ball all over the field on me.”

The Dodgers did not have to. The curveball that Ray had used like a scalpel in his three wins over the Dodgers was now a wayward drone. The slider was a grenade at the feet of catcher Chris Iannetta. Ray threw 88 pitches, three of them wild, only 54 for strikes.

He gave up a second-inning run on two walks and a wild pitch and a grounder. He gave up the Dodgers’ second run on a wild pitch – “I was trying to bury the slider,” he said – and the third one scored when shortstop Ketel Marte neatly gloved Chris Taylor‘s hard bouncer with bases loaded, but could do nothing else.

Ray hit Justin Turner to lead off the fifth and left one batter later, and the Dodgers kept jabbing until they scored four runs. Styles make fights. The home team went back to a minimalist approach, and Ray kept loading up and missing.

“The ball was coming out of my hand great,” Ray said. “I was just all over the place. I got out there and tried to do a little too much.

“But they ground out at-bats on me. I wasn’t able to land my curveball in the strike zone like I had in the other games. They weren’t swinging at the low ones this time.”

That was pretty much what Logan Forsythe said, after he got the first hit off Ray and then scored the second run.

“His fastball played well like it did in the past,” Forsythe said. “Off-speed wise, he was down in the one but it wasn’t that good strike at the bottom of the zone. In the past we’ve gotten out of our approach and tried to do too much. When we keep him in the zone, we do well.”

It was the same type of controlled relentlessness, the preciousness of every plate appearance, that the Dodgers had shown when they set the summer on fire. They have 14 hits and 17 runs in two games, and are 10 for 30 with men in scoring position.

More to the point, they have defused the Death Ray that had zapped them in August and September.

Ray was 3-0 against the Dodgers this season with 53 strikeouts in 32⅓ innings. Corey Seager is now 0 for 8 against him with eight strikeouts. Cody Bellinger is hitting 1 for 9. But Forsythe and Taylor had decent numbers against the lefty from suburban Nashville, who, to be fair, has excelled against most teams. He was 15-5 with a 2.89 in the regular season.

“It’s always a tall task against him, trying to battle and get baserunners,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “But tonight he wasn’t that sharp. The fastball command wasn’t like it had been, and it seemed like he couldn’t strike the breaking ball.”

Real Dodger Stadium veterans looked at the spell Ray had cast on the Dodgers and were transported back to 1966.

A St. Louis left-hander named Larry Jaster faced the Dodgers five times that season. He shut them out five times, too.

Jaster beat Don Drysdale and Claude Osteen twice apiece. He beat Don Sutton. He gave up 24 hits in 45 innings. And that was against a National League championship team.

Which is why many people around the Dodgers blinked Wednesday night when Ray came out of the Arizona dugout during the wild-card win over Colorado.

Ray threw 34 pitches in relief in what became a 11-8 victory. It was 6-4 when he entered the game in the fourth inning. He left with two out in the sixth, and his baserunner scored to cut it to 6-5. But he had cut through the heart of the Colorado lineup to preserve the lead.

There were those who said Lovullo called it exactly right, that there was no need to save Ray for the Dodgers if Arizona didn’t survive the Rockies. And that’s certainly defensible, of course.

But it forced Lovullo to use Taijuan Walker in Game 1, and Walker was shelled for four runs in the only inning he worked. The Diamondbacks lost, 9-5, on a night when they crashed four home runs off a beatable Clayton Kershaw.

Pitchers have unshakable routines for a reason. They are synchronized to do certain things at certain times. Bemoan it if you must. It irritates anyone who remembers the days before pitchers were treated like porcelain dolls. But it’s real.

So today it looks like the kind of mistake that a five-game series rarely forgives. But Games 3-4 are still out there. If the Dodgers lose both, the Death Ray looms on Thursday night, fueled to the max.

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